


but tonight let us not become tragedies

by milenajesenskas



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mental Illness, Self-Harm, drug addiction/rehab, s&m (consensual)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:48:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milenajesenskas/pseuds/milenajesenskas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's shouting overtaken by gunshots in Queens. It's too bright to see the stars that never shine over New York. The city never sleeps, but he sees its nightmares in crime scene photos and behind police tape.</p>
<p>There are some things that he'll never get out of his head. London wasn't a woman, but a series of mistakes. She was his first love, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but tonight let us not become tragedies

"I'm going to be sick." he says in a plane over the Atlantic ocean, pressing a shaking hand over the lips of a much-too-pale face. "Move, I need to get up."

"Sherlock Holmes, sit down." his father hisses through gritted teeth.

It was just like his father, he thought, always concerned with appearances, even while carting a junkie off by plane to the land of the free, home of the many readily available dealers. "Let me out or I'll be sure to be sick on your new shoes this time."

His father rolls his eyes and conceeds. This was not a battle he cared to fight at the moment.

"I'll be back in... I'll be back." he promises, hurrying to go lock himself in the bathroom at the back of the plane. He turns the sink on, throws up for the third time that day, and he could swear the withdrawl wasn't this bad last time. His father also hadn't trapped him in cabs and airplanes with nowhere to breathe last time. He slumps against the door to try to catch his breath, fishes in his coat pockets, swallows the xanax that he finds, and shouts obscenities at whoever made the mistake of knocking on the door of the bathroom that he'd already decided to stay in for the remaining three hours of the flight. 

He'd miss the complementary cookie. He was pretty sure that he didn't care.

  
  


The rehab facility was black granite counters and faux marble floors and every room echoed of a particular type of can-do attitude that made him want to punch a hole in the wall just to break through the white noise. It was nothing like what he was used to. Before that, he was sure that he'd never miss the worn carpets and the cynical nurses, but this oil well of forced positive thinking was certainly making him reconsider.

He'd done this enough to know what to say. Better, he told them. Much better. Couldn't believe it was actually working this time.

His father was going to be disappointed. His father was always disappointed. There was no better, he'd figured out, not really. Only less worse. Still alive. That had to count for something.

  
  


The first thing he did after getting out was to get a real New York street cart hot dog. The second was to walk around Central Park until the flood of sounds and people was too much to take. He made it back to the apartment that his father had bought for him, to find that the walls blocked out all the noise, leaving it eerily quiet. The lack of sound felt like a vacuum that made his skin feel too tight. 

He had to open the window to be able to sleep at all. It would take him a full day and a half and a lot of restless pacing to realize this. It took him all of an hour to leave scratch marks all up and down his arms.

The new sitter that his father had hired must have noticed he was gone by now. He'd have to remember to put some ice on them, then.

  
  


"Joan Watson." she said, but he had already looked her up. There was something about her that kept him from giving her the usual sardonic treatment. He didn't want to think about it too much.

  
  


"Do you have to rearrange my dishes every time I'm gone?" she asked, but of course she knew the answer.

"Yes, I do."

She waited for more, but an actual answer to her question seemed to be swallowed up by the sounds of plates clattering together as they were moved from one shelf to another. "And _why_ is that, exactly?"

"You don't do it right."

"Holmes, have you _seen_ your bedroom?" It was all she could do to keep from rolling her eyes. "And your computer room. And your bathroom. And the hallway--I mean, how do you manage to have dirty clothes in the hallway? Does it just ooze out of your room? Are you getting dressed in the hallway when I'm not here?"

"No." he said, spinning around to sit down on the countertop. "I do it sometimes when you're here too, pay attention."

"You are absolutely impossible."

"I love you too."

  
  


It was winter and the sky was grey and the sun never seemed to shine past half-power, despite the Christmas lights. The world seemed to be like a phone with a faulty battery that wouldn't hold a charge, no matter how much the over-played music tried to cheer everyone up. The dull glow of a wall of television screens against the dull glow of a city covered in snow being shut out behind a window meant Holmes wasn't sleeping. Joan made him keep it shut, saying something about frostbite and pneumonia that he didn't even pretend to listen to. He kept the tvs on at all time for sound, but they were a poor substitute, and he hadn't moved in hours.

"I'm going out for Thai food with the girls. I'll bring you back some curry later."

A part of him always appreciated the fact that she never tried to lecture him or force him out of hiding like the ones before her had. She called him a lost cause, but she never treated him like one. He'd have to make sure to not be difficult later when she came back. It was the best he could offer at the moment. 

  
  


He still hadn't found a way to tell her that she was the reason that he hadn't tried again since he met her.

He wasn't sure that he'd ever figure out how.

  
  


A girl screams and a car horn sounds and there's laughter outside his window. There's a man missing in Brooklyn and three women dead in Manhattan. It's four in the morning and a dog's barking. The sound of screeching tires bounces between buildings. Neon lights pulse across the street, faster and faster, the heartbeat of a wild animal. 

The dog is no longer barking. 

There's shouting overtaken by gunshots in Queens. It's too bright to see the stars that never shine over New York. The city never sleeps, but he sees its nightmares in crime scene photos and behind police tape.

There are some things that he'll never get out of his head. London wasn't a woman, but a series of mistakes. She was his first love, after all.

  
  


“I didn't get your name.” a woman in black says in a run-down apartment in the heart of the city.

“You're not gonna need it either.” he says, grinning, as she fastens his belt around his wrists. 

“You're a feisty one, aren'tya.” she smirks right back and pulls his head down into the bed by his hair. “I like that.”

There's blood in his mouth by the end of it all and he laughs again, keeps laughing until the ring of bruises shows up on his wrists. He closes his eyes and lays back, doesn't fuck her, nor she him, and the adrenaline in his system was all he needed anyway. It was the only drug that wouldn't get him evicted, and he didn't care how he got it. Give him car crashes, gunshots, or bruises left by strangers; the methods didn't matter, only the results.

He throws his shirt back on after, fastens his watch tight around the bruises, and pays her in police money. No one ever appreciated the irony.

  
  


The night he kisses her is cold and loud. A car alarm's been wailing in the street on and off for the better part of two hours. His hands are shaking from stress or lack of sleep, and each slamming door that echoes through the halls makes him flinch. She's sure he doesn't notice. The television in the living room is on, and both of them are in front of it. It's playing reruns of trash tv that they both got hooked on in their tenures in hospitals, but neither of them are paying attention.

A door slams above them, and he buries his head in his hands. “I was wrong, you know. About what I said before.”

“...What?”

“What I said about not needing you. ...I lied. I didn't think I was lying, but I was.”

The tv played on while Joan shifted in her seat. “What are you talking-”

“I mean _I need you_.” He kept his head in his hands and purposefully didn't look at her. “I can't lie to you. ...I mean, I can, obviously, but I'd rather not. I'm probably not supposed to, anyway. I can't do this on my own.”

“Holmes, it's my job to help you out. That's what I'm here for.”

“Yeah, I know, it's your job.” Neither of them speak for a long time, and Joan, for once, doesn't know what to do. “I meant what I said when we first met. And, to come full circle, I thought I was lying then. But I wasn't.”

“You know I don't-”

“I know.” He wrings his hands together for a moment and kisses the top of her head before leaving for his seat on the roof. “I wouldn't either.”

  
  


It's three minutes, fifteen seconds until the ball drops, and they're drunk off the buzz of the lights. A low rumbling echoes in the streets below from crowds and novelty clickers and horns. There's going to be a clean-up crew tomorrow morning, but for tonight, everyone in the city are old friends, wrapped up in the rush of another second chance.

It's one minute, forty-nine seconds until the ball drops, and Holmes has his legs dangling over the edge, screaming Auld Lang Syne at the top of his lungs. Joan is laughing behind him, his hand in hers, threatening to push him off if he doesn't get down before midnight. He grins wide and scoots closer to the edge, throws his plastic buzzer out into the night, and never stops singing.

It's seventeen seconds until the ball drops, and Joan sits down beside him. The crowd below starts chanting the countdown, and they both shout it back at them.

The city explodes at midnight, and Joan kisses him on the cheek. “It's good luck, you know.”

“We'll need it.”

  
  


“Sorry about your mirror.” he says softly as she lays his arm across the towel on her lap.

“It's fine. Keep your arm like that.”

He looks down, too ashamed to watch her as she pulls bloodied glass out with tweezers and drops it in the trashcan beside her. “I didn't mean to wake you up.”

“Don't worry about it.” she says, her voice flat from sleep, and she pours rubbing alcohol over the gashes. He doesn't blink. “I don't think you'll need stitches, but we'll see how it is tomorrow. Just don't let it get infected.”

“Yeah.”

She wraps his arm in the gauze from the first aid kit, and makes him look at her. “We'll talk about this in the morning. Try to go to sleep now.”

“You're going to have to tell my father about this, aren't you?”

“You're clean, right?” He nodded slowly, like a child who'd been caught doing what he'd been told not to. “Then no. I'll take care of it. We'll figure something out, alright?”

“... _Thank you_.”

  
  


The moon is out over the city tonight, and they're gonna take it by storm. Holmes has a razorblade in an old Altoids tin in his coat pocket, and Joan can break a man's fingers with one hand behind her back, but physical destruction is only the start of their arsenal. Word gets around in the city. People were afraid of him, and he used it. People were afraid of him without knowing she was the one to look out for.

London may have been his first love, but that's not to say he couldn't have another.

They walk through the city, down alleyways and between cars, and they both may have hit bottom, but neither of them is going out without a fight.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "We Were Emergencies" by Buddy Wakefield


End file.
